It was 1971, I think. I was working at the newly established UT School of Public Health in Houston. Mine was an IT job. And one of my duties was helping the school’s graduate students with the computational aspects of their theses and dissertations.
One of those students was Ron, a Japanese American student who had a degree in architecture. We became friends and I became his willing ally in his public health analysis of US Census data. During one of our conversations, he mentioned the arcologies of Paolo Soleri – an Italian American architect who conceived of buildings capable of housing entire cities. He lent me a book that illustrated and described Soleri’s visions. Soleri’s arcologies combined architecture and ecology. His idea was to create megastructures capable of providing for all the needs and activities of a million or more people without despoiling tens of thousands of square miles of land. Just imagine a building a mile wide, a mile long, and a mile high. Wow!
In a different conversation, Ron told me about ganzfeldts. Ganzfeldt is a German word. Ganz means all or entire. Feldt means field. So, a ganzfeldt is an entire field (of view). The gist of creating a ganzfeldt is visual sensory deprivation. A ganzfeldt is space in which the illumination is so uniform that one cannot see gradations of light intensity let alone shadows. In a ganzfeldt, one cannot judge distances. I know; it sounds weird. Perhaps you recall the final scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 where Dave finds himself in a hospital bed. The room he was in was a kind of ganzfeldt.
I have been thinking about arcologies, megastructures and ganzfeldts because my FB buddy Robert de Faro sent me a heads up regarding the movie Moonfall a few days ago. It turns out that Susan and I had watched this Emmerich gobal apocalypse story a month or more ago, but we must have fallen asleep during the movie because neither of us remembered squat about it! In any case, that movie posits that our Moon is a megastructure created by aliens – an alien arcology of sorts. In the latter part of the movie, our protagonists find themselves inside an alien structure part of which is a ganzfeldt. The ganzfedlt metaphor is used often in SciFi movies particularly for scenes in which the characters are communing with aliens or God or some other form of the Infinite.
What does it all mean? Whatever meaning you choose to give it, of course. For me, it is an opportunity to reflect on my own circuitous journey that have brought me to this place and this time with these memories.